Here is a fun example of a really long sentence, though not a run-on since it is all connected phrases:

DEATH SENTENCE
Have you heard how Cuthbert Hatch
To find a gas leak struck a match
And thereby hastened his dispatch
To realms unknown to you and me
Who have not yet been foolishly
Inclined to leave posterity
To puzzle for itself just why

Making the best use of the morning commute is a challenge, when kids are still sleepy and not ready for anything too challenging. One possibility is to play an audio snippet. To play in the car without wifi, save the file ahead of time by right-clicking on the link to the .mp3 and choosing 'Save link as...' or similar.

Scratch from MIT : http://scratch.mit.edu is a graphical interface for creating logical object-oriented programs, quickly and easily. I read a review of it in MAKE Magazine some months ago and finally tried it out. Looks extremely promising, and its easy to put together a simple intelligent animation in minutes. (well, a bit more for reading the instructions - but after I read them it didn't take long)

I like to start off teaching Javascript, because everyone with a computer has all the tools you need: a browser and a text editor. Its pretty easy to have kids change the screen color, make pop-ups appear, take user input and munge it around. But kids want to program games, so I'm considering Flash. In the meantime, here is a full-fledged Javascript game we may try to edit.